When I asked my parents to check a late
draft of the website text in October 2003, Tim made the following comments
on The Guardian article, written in 1990:

"Thanks to Berry, who was in fact
a Flight Sergeant, I just made landfall at West Wittering, which was within
three miles of where the aircraft landed, not 60."

"Second, your point about decimation.
It spurred me to do some research. In fact, we only lost seven pilots killed
during the Battle. Yes, in general the losses in the month were very high,
but No. 1 was pulled back to Wittering on 9 September, before the worst occurred.
If I showed you the list of squadron casualties in my book, that included
all of those of that time who were eventually killed. And the number was boosted
in my listing with three names which I cannot find on the Roll of Honour."

Well, I stand corrected. The only
point I would make in my defence is that the original meaning of decimation,
as used when Roman legions were punished, was the death of 1 in 10 legion
members.

Another
fifty years will see many more billions living in the world. John Elkington
on priorities for the future.

As the world changes around us, so do the ways in which we interpret
even such well-established symbols as the White Cliffs of Dover. With the
Battle of Britain very much in the public eye [this was the 50th anniversary
year], consider some of the ways in which the developing Battle for the Planet
will force us to view our world in a different light. But, first, a story.

Fifty years ago, in the wake of Dunkirk, the White Cliffs symbolised
a proud island nation waiting for the full onslaught of Hitler's airborne
legions. Soon, the skies over southern England were crosshatched with vapour
trails as "The Few" confronted the might of the world's deadliest
war machine. As the dog-fights howled back and forth overhead, farm-workers
reported finding rabbits bolt upright on their back legs on the chalk hills,
paralysed with terror.

At the time, my father - Tim Elkington - was a 19-year-old pilot
with No. 1 Squadron. A fighter pilot's average life expectancy was 87 flying
hours and a fair number died before they even had time to unpack their kit-bags.
Nonetheless, on August 12, Tim claimed an Me. 109. On the 15th, he also painted
a mythical animal on his Hurricane's cowling for good luck.

The next day he was "Top Weaver", flying back and
forth over the rest of the squadron to provide an early warning of enemy fighters,
when they encountered 100 German aircraft. In the ensuing melée, he
never saw the aircraft that riddled his plane with cannon shells - although,
amazingly, his mother did. From nearby Hayling Island and quite unaware that
her son was involved, she watched the lone Hurricane pursued by three Me.
109s. Tim's fuel tank exploded, peppering him with shrapnel.

Perhaps not what most people would think of as good luck. Yet
his luck did hold. Unconscious as he drifted seawards in his parachute, he
would certainly have drowned. Then his flight leader, Sergeant Berry*,
achieved the extraordinary feat of blowing him back over land with his aircraft's
slipstream. He was lucky in another way, too. On August 18, the RAF was put
through the mincer on its "hardest day", losing 136 planes. While
he was in hospital and convalescing, No. 1 Squadron was decimated.

Flt Sergeant Berry plunged to the ground on September 1, before
Tim could even thank him. For Tim, who had also been fired on by the Home
Guard as he came down in his chute, the main legacy of the incident, apart
from cannon shell wounds in his legs, was the shrapnel still in his body.
For years afterwards it worked rather like a barometer, warning of impending
changes in the weather.

Everyone forgot about his abandoned Hurricane, which banking
inland, flew on for more than 60 miles before crashing near Tonbridge. But
in 1975, the Wealden Aviation Archaeological Group found the plane's Merlin
engine, armour plate and cockpit controls deep beneath the Kentish soil.

Now the chalk layers beneath such soils are yielding important
clues about events much further back in the planet's history which could help
us respond to what looks set to become an even greater threat to our future
than the Luftwaffe posed in 1940.

The White Cliffs of Dover, it turns out, are part of what is
known as the Upper Chalk. Laid down during the Cretaceous Period, beginning
some 130 million years ago, the chalk formed from the skeletons of tiny marine
organisms in warm, shallow seas, taking massive quantities of carbon dioxide
out of circulation. The rate at which the carbon dioxide was sponged up offers
vital clues on the way our atmosphere and climate have evolved.

I haven't asked my father whether his shrapnel is sensitive
to impending climate changes but global warming - caused by "greenhouse
gases" like carbon dioxide - is rising inexorably towards the top of
the political agenda. Indeed, so great is the potential threat that future
historians may well look at these early years of environmentalism and be tempted
to repeat Winston Churchill's words of August 20, 1940: "Never in the
field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."

The parallels between the Battle of Britain and the developing
Battle for the Planet can be stretched too far, but are certainly striking.
Like Churchill himself, environmentalists were fighting the battle long before
the rest of the world had woken up to the threat. As with the RAF in 1940,
their numbers have been relatively small, their ranks made up of highly motivated
people drawn from every walk of life. But they have grown used to flying by
the seat of their pants - and their impact has been out of all proportion
both to their inadequate numbers and resources.

They have been our Top Weavers, warning of risks such as ozone
depletion and global warming at a time when some recently greened politicians
still viewed environmentalists as the enemy within. Thanks to those early
warnings, ordinary people are waking up to the fact that we have all been
unwittingly fighting - and winning - a war against the Earth itself.

Now the world's population is forecast to increase by another
billion in the 1990s alone. Already under massive strain with the burden of
over five billion people, the planet will have to cope with perhaps twice
that number by the time we celebrate the centenary of the Battle of Britain.
But there are more signs of hope than there were in 1940, or even 20 years
ago when campaigning groups like Friends of the Earth were launched.

For one thing, the threat to our global environment is helping
heal old enmities. Ironically, many years after the war, my father met - and
very much liked - the German who had shot him down. Now not only are we joining
a reunited Germany in a larger Europe but NATO is saying that Russia is no
longer the common enemy - and that environmental destruction is. As the superpowers
begin to throttle back their war machines, there may be a "peace dividend"
to spend at a time when world leaders are waking up to the need to invest
in environmental security. Russia has already asked for environmental aid.

The international environmental movement, meanwhile, is only
just getting into its stride. Our recent GreenWorld survey, covering over
30 countries, shows the movement to be in a surprisingly buoyant mood. Having
struggled for years to get their organisations and campaigns airborne, they
are now confident that environmentalism will become the most important political,
social and economic movement globally by the year 2000.

The key factor that will drive the process is the dawning recognition
that we live in a greenhouse world. Given that the carbon dioxide trapped
in an inch or two of the 1,000 ft deep Upper Chalk layer is equivalent to
all of the carbon dioxide in today's atmosphere, I suspect that my own children's
generation will come to think of the White Cliffs very differently - as a
symbol of the global carbon cycle which we are now disrupting with our profligate
fossil fuel burning and tropical deforestation.

* According to Kenneth Wynn's book Men
of the Battle of Britain, Frederick George Berry was born in 1914, joined
the RAF in 1929 and had won a DFM for shooting down an He 111 over St Nazaire
in 1940. Not long after he saved Tim, he was shot down and killed in September
1 1940 and is buried in Pinner New Cemetery, Harrow, Middlesex.

** I also remember as a child seeing black,
oxidised bits of shrapnel popping out of Tim's skin after a hot bath.